Bobby Rush at age 86 survived a bout with CoVid-19 earlier this year and is back with a stripped-down acoustic effort that in one sense is a follow-up to his all-original 2007 Raw, the one that has him crossing over to an Americana audience for the first time. It also inspired a series of acoustic shows, that remain popular today. This writer has witnessed one of those shows and can attest to how genuine, engaging, and witty Rush can be. It’s the other side of his glitzy entertainer persona as he digs into the pure blues. Accordingly, the Grammy-winner and multiple Grammy nominee returns with Rawer Than Raw, a recording as unadorned as possible, just Rush’s gravelly, gritty voice, guitar, harmonica, and feet. The album pays tribute to Rush’s favorite blues artists who originally hailed from Mississippi, a state where the Louisiana-born Rush has long resided in Jackson. The album was recorded there over the span of several years with engineer and executive produce Randy Everett, a Mississippi native.
The focus is on Blues Hall of Famers: seminal Delta great Skip James and Robert Johnson as well as Rush’s contemporaries on the music scene of the ‘50s and ‘60s in Chicago – Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Elmore James. The album features half a dozen of their best-known songs rendered in Rush’s singular style with wailing blues harp and foot-stomping. Rush also added five originals all credited under his given name, Emmett Ellis Jr. These are “Down in Mississippi,” “Let Me In Your House,” “Sometimes I Wonder,” “Let’s Make Love Again,” and “Garbage Man.”
Rush provides his sentiments in the liners. Here are a couple of excerpts “…Without these kinds of guys and kinds of songs, I wouldn’t have had the guidance for being a bluesman. I learned from the elders…my elders. Now I’m the elder, teaching the young people coming along about the blues and keeping it alive.” And, later – “Most of the guys I did these records on, I didn’t know personally when I first heard them. I just heard them on WLAC Nashville Tn …I learned about these guys as a young man listening to the radio. I always wanted to be a bluesman.”
We learn later through his notes that he eventually met most of them and developed a personal connection. Rush considers Skip James a father figure who was a contemporary of Son House and Robert Johnson. James’ career revived in the ‘60s which is when Rush met him shortly before his passing in 1969. Rush does one on James’ best-known songs, “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” retitled “Hard Times,” citing it as appropriate for these times too. Rush first met Howlin’ Wolf — a.k.a. Chester Burnett, from tiny White Station, Miss. — in 1951 in Arkansas, and six years later he introduced the gravelly-voiced singer to his second wife in Chicago. Wolf, who died in 1976 at age 65, still looms large for Rush as the model of a blues singer. Wolf is the only artist honored with two tracks, the famous “Smokestack Lightning” and the relatively obscure 1961 B-side “Shake It for Me”(originally “Shake for Me,” recorded by Howlin’ Wolf and written by Willie Dixon), which is probably best known for inspiring some of the lyrics in Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” eight years later. (for which Dixon, sadly, never received songwriting royalties).
While Rush admired Wolf for his deep feel for the blues his admiration for Muddy Waters extends to Muddy’s sartorial flourishes and entertainment persona. Rush got to know Waters, Wolf, and others such as Jimmy Reed, Ike Turner, Elmore James, and Buddy Guy in Chicago. One of Waters’ big Chess hits was “Honey Bee, Sail On,” which Rush interprets here, though his rendition owes something to an earlier treatment of the song by the folk singer Leadbelly— titled “Sail On, Little Girl” — recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax in 1935. The third covered artist is harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson II, — a.k.a. Alex Miller, from Tutwiler, Mississippi — who was a frequent collaborator of Rush’s early mentor and sometime employee, slide-guitar great Elmore James. Rush performs Williamson’s often-covered 1955 hit “Don’t Start Me Talkin’,” a favorite of rock acts like the New York Dolls, the Doobie Brothers, and Bob Dylan.
Rush cleverly honors both Robert Johnson and his former bandmate Elmore James in the famous “Dust My Broom,” written by Johnson but popularized by James. Rush first met James in 1947 when he was an underage kid with a fake mustache trying to sneak into Arkansas juke joints to play and later hired him in Chicago. The song’s inclusion is as much a tribute to the man who taught it to him — the Richland, Mississippi-born James, who played with Johnson before his death in 1938 and had his own hit with it in 1951 featuring Williamson on harp.
Rush has rarely been acknowledged for his great harmonica and guitar skills, but you hear plenty of both here. Also, the casual blues fan will likely have trouble distinguishing Rush’s own songs from the covers which are interpreted not mimicked. All these tunes are played in a similar style, a testament to Rush’s deep roots as his originals often are built from the same kind of riffs that he covers as in “Let’s Make Love Again” and “Smokestack Lightning” as one clear example. Even such recognizable fare as “Smokestack Lightning” and “Shake It For Me’ vary considerably from the known versions. Settle in, appreciate Rush’s deep natural affinity for one of America’s great musical idioms. Rush is a living legend who shows no signs of slowing down as he strives to keep the blues alive.
Photo by Bill Steber
